Reading Lovecraft in Spanish: The Borgesian Key to Eldritchness

While on a visit with family in South America this Christmas, I decided to explore a bookstore in the mall known for having English language editions.
This led to some musings about literary translations to and from our favorite genres that y’all might find worth considering.
Like B&N here in the states, Panamerica is mostly a toy store with some books. They are also a publisher and again, like B&N ,have a fairly nice hardback editions of classics in the public domain. I was pleased to see several offerings from Lovecraft, and grabbed one. My satisfaction with the price, bookbinding quality, and cool cover art was barely reduced at realizing it was a “literatura juvenil” edition.
I thought my familiarity with Lovecraft's work might allow me to see how well Grandpa translated into Spanish without the occasional lookup in Google translate. I ended up referring back to an online English version of Call of Cthulhu.
I don’t know why I thought that the opening paragraph of CoC would be some kind of revelation in Spanish. The translator seemed to be doing an adequate job, introducing what were likely unabridged Spanish dictionary words that might delight Lovecraft if he spoke Spanish.
That’s when I had my epiphany that I can best explain in terms of style/content. I guess I never critically considered this, but intuitively recognized that a writer like Lovecraft is at his best when the cosmically significant notions and emotions are adequately conveyed by his stylistic capabilities. The interesting thing as this relates to translation is Lovecraft has an advantage in other languages over an author more adept in wordsmithing. Much of style is lost in even the best translation, but the power of the content of ideas and suggested atmosphere can come through more or less intact.
My muddled expectations confused the insights I had gotten rereading Borges or Garcia-Marquez in the original, it doesn’t work the other way. This got me pondering the appeal of Borges in English and it not only confirmed this idea of content payload over style, but also suggested how similar he is to Lovecraft (already admirably covered in the There Are More Things thread)
If this line of thought is appealing I highly recommend Andrew Hurley’s cool article on the lessons he learned translating Borges from which I partially lifted the style/content construct above.

I wish I had enough knowledge of any other language to be able to translate, or read, but I've definitely noticed the variances in work connotations when working with another language. We had to write a short poem in Swedish class, and I remember discussing with the teacher the general opinions around the various words for "small" in Swedish. In English, the words "tiny," "little," "small" etc. all have slightly different impressions. I remember being mildly annoyed that the word my Swedish teacher said had the closest associations was not a word that I thought sounded good for the poem.

I've noticed that Lovecraft has a set of words he liked to use. I'd be interested to see if similar sets pop up in adaptations of his work and what impressions those words carry.

I've noticed that Lovecraft has a set of words he liked to use. I'd be interested to see if similar sets pop up in adaptations of his work and what impressions those words carry.

Well “cíclopea” definitely pops up a few times. With Spanish sentence structure and a predominance of Latinate words (vs their Anglo-Saxon analogs) I felt Lovecraft’s descriptive cadence was lost. However check out how this famous verse more or less retains the rhyme:

“No está muerto lo que para siempre puede dormir
Y con el arribo de insólitas eras, quizás hasta la muerte pueda morir”

Ok it doesn’t quite roll off the same, but A for effort.
“Grandes Primigenios” didn’t work as well for me for The Great Old Ones